It looks like Nissan is about to kick its smallest North American crossover into touch. The current Mexico-built Kicks went on sale in the summer of 2018 so it’s not hugely surprising that our spy photographers have captured its replacement testing ahead of a 2024 reveal.
Those photographers thought it might be the next Juke, a name the slightly larger Kicks replaced in the U.S., but which is still alive and kicking in Europe where the Kicks isn’t available. But this crossover prototype’s more sober styling and the fact the Juke didn’t enter production until late 2019 and received a (very minor) update last year suggests it’s not the car hiding under the camo in these pics.
Despite the presence of all that camouflage we’re left in no doubt that the second-gen Kicks will be a more grown-up car than the first. While the current Kicks’ styling is less flamboyant than the Juke’s, featuring, for instance, a rear door handle located on the door skin rather than in the C-pillar, the new car’s designers seem to have kicked the sensibleness up a gear.
The front end appears to be more chiselled to impart a sense of strength and make the Kicks look like a bigger car. There’s even what looks like a conservative VW-esque horizontal grille rather than the awful U-shaped monstrosity on the existing car, and while there’s still a pronounced flick in the waistline over the rear arch, it’s a less dramatic one than we’re familiar with.
Related: Mystery Nissan SUV Spied, Is It The Next Juke Or Kicks?
We still expect Nissan to carry over its bisected C-pillar treatment though, and the shape of the rear hatch outline looks vaguely more interesting than the subcompact crossover norm, though with so much tape on the rear end it’s impossible to know whether those vertical light units will also extend inwards across the hatch.
The current U.S. Kicks is powered by a 1.6-liter four-cylinder gasoline engine, though it’s currently unknown whether that same engine would be carried over to the new one, or whether it would adopt a smaller turbocharged engine and/or hybrid technology. The Kicks is already available with hybrid power in some countries, but not in North America.
Production of the new car was slated to start in December of this year, but Automotive News recently reported that the date had been pushed back to June 2024 due to a combination of the car failing crash tests and the theft of tooling from a supplier in Mexico. So expect Kicks Mk2 to appear in U.S. dealers a year from now as a 2025 car.
